The British Medical Journal (BMJ) have been doing this for a while - publishing both the peer-review comments and author responses.
I have published a paper in the BMJ and thought the process worked well and tempered the responses on both sides.
We are not aiming to change the way you purchase dental services. Rather, we focus on ensuring you don't buy unnecessary dental services.
Let's say you are Delta Dental, these 28% are basically an insurance fraud. If you could get rid of it, you would save billions. You could offer lower premiums and full coverage without any copays.
What a feeling it must be for the researchers involved in this, if it turns into a method of improving pancreatic cancer survival. I am glad their are so many medical researchers driven in this way.
My mother passed away from pancreatic cancer last year; she had no symptoms until two months before she passed, when she got a diagnosis from a scan. There are a lot of trials ongoing looking at how the area around the pancreas impacts how well different therapies work in treating it.
This is really interesting as it suggests a new avenue to improve treatment, as well as a potential tool for easier diagnosis.
This reminds me a lot of the cancers attributed to HPV, a common virus. The researchers who discovered that link have likely saved millions of lives.
Almost every instance of cervical cancer is attributed to HPV. 70% of throat cancers, 90% of anal cancers, 60% of penile cancers, 75% vaginal, and 70% vulvar cancers. [1]
It always stunned me that one little virus that used to be seen just as an embarrassment was re-categorized as being a huge risk factor for deadly cancers.
If the person who identified a common bacteria being responsible for almost all ulcers got a Nobel price, the HPV <--> cancer researchers should also have been considered, IMHO.
"...person who identified a common bacteria..." (Barry Marshall)
Helicobacter pylori is also a suspect carcinogen, specifically in some stomach cancers. I am now wondering if it assists this evil fungus in any indirect way. Over half the world population carries h pylori, apparently mostly asymptomatically.
There's the poo test and a breath test.. beyond that I'm unsure. The breath test seems less available, maybe. Consider the following before alarming yourself though. H pylori, if asymptomatic, may be at a level of what some in the medical field deem best left alone. The goal in some treatments seems to beat it down rather than eradicate it. Rationale seems to weigh cost\benefit of slaughtering all the good stuff to get the bad when the bad might not do much beneath a threshold. I'm no authority. The subject, I do think is worth reading about and it doesn't appear there's a clearly advised plan for the infected asymptomatic majority.
For H Pylori, there are 2 tests that are both pretty easy: one is a blood test and the other is a breathing test (they collect the exhalation in some bag.) The results are returned fairly quickly
I lost my mom this year to the same cancer and I get really excited with any advancements that are made in this area. I feel like we're still playing with sticks and stones in terms of pancreatic cancer treatment. The whole surgery plus chemotherapy is just barbaric.
Chiming in as someone who works at an insurer in clinical analytics.
There's a few ways we can pay less for a compound where there are generics/biosimilars. We could contract with a hospital group saying we will pay a small % markup on the cheapest drug to treat each condition - i.e. they can use the cheapest generic/biosimilar and make profit, or use a more expensive one and make a loss. They naturally shift all volume to the cheaper one. That then makes demand very elastic to price, and so encourages a lower price from manufacturers. We do see some compounds all sit at the same lowest price and not shift - that does suggest collusion - potentially tacit collusion though. An alternative is to contract with one pharma company to get a rebate if we push volume to their drug. We could then mandate to providers that we'll only pay for that drug.
They do that, or contract with companies (like PBMs) to do so. That's been the way this works forever. Asymptotically no one pays the ~$40k+/mo list price.
In the UK, since WW2, ROI for buying a house and renting it out has on average kept pace with the stock market, albeit with far less volatility. This is including the house price growth and income from renting it out exceeding the debt.
This shouldn't happen - there should be a premium return for investing in something risky. The reason it has happened is because of policies such as being able to discount mortgage costs from rent before you pay tax on the rent (the government is phasing this out).
What has been the result of this? People who can borrow a lot (the rich) have hoovered up houses, reducing home ownership, raising house prices & rents, and making lots of money in a not very productive way. This is bad - a few decades ago average house prices were about 4x average salary, now it is 10+. Incentives to work hard are becoming out of touch. Also, all the money people are investing in housing could have been invested in starting a new company, or something risky but rewarding.
A very real world and practical look at UK politics. When it costs £100,000 from your own pocket to stand, and councillor jobs (that are the training ground for MPs) are part-time but spread throughout working hours, we aren't really selecting politicians from a diverse pool.
Non-technical but very interesting and emotive to most people.
Healthcare analytics